With the deepening practice of the concept of sustainable development and the increasingly significant impact of the environment and society of reverse logistics activities, the design of sustainable reverse logistics network is becoming a research hotspot. Firstly, this paper systematically summarizes the general situation of sustainable reverse logistics network design research. Then the paper overviews the progress from five aspects, including the indicators and methods for measuring economic, environmental and social sustainability, the decision variables, objective functions and constraints of mathematical models, the uncertainties considered and the treatment techniques, the methods and tools of model solving and research application. It is found that the indicators of economic, environmental and social impact measurement need to be expanded, especially the decision-making variables of environmental and social impact are less considered, the overall research of social sustainability is less and the measurement method needs to be broken through. At the same time, the real reverse logistics operation scenarios such as multi-period, multi product, cross docking, collecting according to quality level and uncertain environment, are not considered enough, and the integration and optimization of strategies, tactics and operation levels are not enough. All of above restrict the application of the model. In the face of complex mathematical models, interval optimization and simulation are seldom used to solve uncertain problems, theremore, more efficient and reliable meta heuristic algorithms or precise algorithms need to be designed urgently. Moreover, simulation optimization technology and cross entropy are used for efficiency evaluation or algorithm to algorithm ratio to improve the efficiency and scientificity of network design. Finally, the prospects of sustainable reverse logistics network design are presented.